OTHER: Why Does My Toaster Require High Security?

OTHER: Why Does My Toaster Require High Security?

An IoT (Internet of Things) network comprises hundreds or thousands of sensors streaming data to one or more analytics engines. The role of the data analytics engines is to detect anomalies that need immediate attention in order to avoid downtime or other unintended consequences. Unfortunately, the IoT sensors can support only minimal software, and security protections are at a minimum. Unfortunately, this has led to the infection of hundreds of thousands of IoT devices with malware such as Mirai. Once a sensor is infected with Mirai, the malware searches for other sensors to infect. Mirai organizes these devices into a massive botnet that can be used to launch massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Services) attacks against a target. A recent such attack took down the Internet across major portions of the United States on Friday, October 21, 2016, by disabling a major Domain Name System (DNS) server. With the DNS system unavailable, users could not access web sites served by the DNS system. This affected many popular web sites such as NetFlix and the New York Times. In this presentation, we describe the risks posed by IoT DDoS attacks.